Leadership: Sad Facts and Silver Linings

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The Idea in Brief

You know you’ve had a good day when nothing goes according to plan.

What, you ask? Why would urgent phone calls, noisy problems, and fragmented attention to a bewildering array of issues be good for senior executives? And why should you resist the urge to defend your neat calendar against these messy onslaughts of reality?

Because, according to Tom Peters, your job is not to solve problems. You can’t. Your attention is too fragmented, issues come to you too late, and you’re shielded from bad news. Your real responsibilities are to shape your company’s values and educate by example.

The frustrations—or sad facts—that plague executives let you do just that. They help you take key stakeholders’ pulses, plant ideas, send guiding signals, and build consensus in favor of vital new directions, values, and priorities.

The Idea in Practice

You encounter four particularly sad facts daily. Yet each has a silver lining that offers you opportunities to shape values and set direction:

1. Not enough choices: You usually receive just one option for review—e.g., one investment proposal rather than several fully developed choices. You face yes/no decisions.

Use a single option to detect whether the company’s heading in the direction you desire; e.g., is a proposed new product slate aimed at the right customers? Then signal division managers: “You have (or haven’t) gotten the message.”

2. Limited time: You don’t see critical issues until late, because proposals omit problems that arose earlier. You end up tackling 11th-hour problems in fragmented bits of time.

Silver lining: Use each time fragment to wrestle with pieces of larger issues—and continually signal your preferences.

3. Too many filters: Managers hide bad news from you.

Silver lining: Commenting on good news lets you reinforce the organization’s larger values and priorities. Example:

One CEO uncovered exemplary actions by salesmen and asked how they pulled them off—then broadcast the ideas in a memo circulated throughout the company.

4. Too much inertia: Major choices take months or years to emerge.

Silver lining: A lengthy choice process lets you build consensus behind a crucial strategic shift that your firm will implement, often years later. Muddling about on the way to major change provides “marinating time” and prevents premature negative reactions. Example:

An industrial-products maker faced substitute product invasions from new markets. It shifted from an engineering to a market orientation—over five years. First, it launched trial balloons: assessing long-term competitive outlook, hiring outside senior marketers, and assigning one marketer a budget to develop products for a threatened market niche.

At year three, bolder actions came: promoting one marketer to senior VP, announcing the new corporate theme at the shareholders’ meeting (“Our emerging role is to be preeminent in marketing”), and launching successful products that struck back at the competition. After five years, the firm had radically—but quietly—shifted focus.

It may come as some consolation to frazzled executives that there have never been enough hours in the working day. Business was already moving at blistering speed when this article first appeared in 1979. And as far back as 1955, Fortune magazine wrote of the typical senior executive, “He [authors always assumed a “he” in those days] is constantly pressed for time.”

The speed of business is the enemy of tidy rationality. Urgent phone calls interrupt long-planned meetings, noisy problems break into time allotted to quiet reflection, and before long, the orderly world of the executive’s schedule is in shambles.

Which is just fine, says author Tom Peters, in 1979 a consultant at McKinsey & Company but soon to go on to fame as coauthor of In Search of Excellence. The leader’s job is not to defend a rigid timetable against reality but to promote and protect the organization’s values. Interruptions offer an opportunity to do so. A crisis with a key client may force you to cut short a product development meeting. Perfect—a chance to demonstrate how to solve problems and care for customers. In other words, you know you’ve had a good day when nothing goes according to plan.

You are executive vice president of a sizable corporation, challenged by competitors at home and abroad. During the past year, you have tried to get the organization moving on a much-needed overhaul of the product line. Today one of the task forces will spend all day reviewing its key findings with you.

Twenty minutes into the presentation, it is already clear that the task force has come up with a future product array with no apparent flexibility. You are being asked to bet several million dollars on a risky slate that is sure to be challenged before the first products hit the marketplace.

Then at 9:35 you are pulled out of the review to talk with the vice chairman about a product safety challenge that has just hit the local press. You get back to the meeting at 11:05, only to be pulled out again at 11:40: The president wants to verify the amount of capital spending in next year’s budget before a luncheon with an outside board member. Finally, after returning at 12:35, you are pulled out for good at 2:15 to meet a major customer who has flown in unexpectedly to talk about a $20 million bid that one of your major divisions just made. So, in the end, the six straight hours you had planned to give to that all-important product-line issue were cut down to less than three.

The preceding situation would expose you to attack from two kinds of management thinkers. Decision-making theorists would chide you for failing to develop a wide range of options. Time-effectiveness experts would criticize you for not going off campus and devoting the full six-hour block to such a major issue.

There is, however, another side to the coin: The scenario just sketched is typical of the real world of senior management; it is, in fact, the norm.

Executives have sensed for years that this series of interruptions with the task at hand sandwiched in represents a true picture of the way they do business, but only recently has such a routine been thoroughly documented. Canadian researcher Henry Mintzberg noted in an article (“The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact,” HBR July–August 1975) that they moved in a fragmented fashion through a bewildering array of issues on any given day; in fact, fully half of their activities were completed in less than nine minutes.

Moreover, he argued that such behavior was probably both appropriate and efficient. A chief executive officer provides a unique perspective and is a unique information source, Mintzberg pointed out. His ability to influence a large number of activities through brief contacts may, in fact, be a highly leveraged use of his time. More recently, examining 25 major business decisions, Mintzberg found that, in every case, top management deliberation focused on only one option. They were all go/no-go issues—not a multiple choice question in the lot.

More than a decade ago, H. Edward Wrapp postulated in a much-quoted article (“Good Managers Don’t Make Policy Decisions,” HBR September–October 1967) that the successful manager “recognizes the futility of trying to push total packages or programs through the organization . . .. Avoiding debates on principles, he tries to piece together particles that may appear to be incidentals into a program that moves at least part way toward [his goals].”

Without offering many prescriptions, other researchers, too, are challenging the conventional organizational wisdom concerning the supposed advantages of orderly decision-making processes and the supposed waste of time of meetings, telephone conversations, unscheduled interruptions, and so on. The researchers do not deny the rationality of accepted notions about how a top executive ought to spend his time, nor do they dismiss out of hand the values of orderly management.

Rather, by challenging the realism of advice based on a model so much less messy than the real world, they suggest that executive behavior that results from an ad hoc adaptation to shifting circumstances is not in itself irrational. Such behavior might, after all, prove to be the expression of a very different organizing principle.

Reckoning with Realities

Over the past two years, several of my colleagues and I have been attempting to analyze the workings of advanced decision-making systems in some two dozen corporations in the United States and Western Europe. In general, our observations support the views of the realists against the less practical rationalizations of conventional organization theory. Our findings can be summarized under the following four headings:

Real-World Decision Making: Ragged but Right

1. Senior managers will usually receive for review what amounts to a single option (one new product slate, one acquisition candidate, one major investment proposal) rather than a set of fully developed choices. They usually face yes-or-no decisions rather than trade-offs. Rarely, moreover, does the proposal that they see include assessments of possible competitive responses or government constraints that are likely to emerge over the long term.

2. Senior management will spend most of its time fighting fires and may not come upon critical issues until late in the game. It is unusual for senior management to get a look at proposals when the options are still wide open. Published scientific papers (the equivalent of polished proposals) typically suggest an “immaculate, rational, step-by-step approach to discovery,” notes science historian Robert Merton in his book Social Theory and Social Structure (Free Press, 1968); the dead ends and assumptions left untested because of time constraints never show up in the finished product.

3. Senior managers will be shielded from most bad news. Obviously, the monthly or quarterly revenues and net income figures that top managers see are reasonably straightforward and timely; even by playing with receivables or speeding up deliveries, a division manager cannot hide bad news at this level for long. But really bad news—for example, on a share decline in a critical segment of a product line—can be concealed for months, sometimes for years.

4. Most really important decisions emerge only after top managers have vacillated for months or years, and the solution they choose at the end may well be indistinguishable from that proposed at the beginning of the search. In practice, top managers typically respond to major issues with trial balloons. They seldom make a public commitment to a choice before they are quite sure that: (a) its wisdom is no longer open to serious question, and (b) the organization is agreeable.

Each of these observations seemingly casts a gloomy cloud over the potential for a rational organization theory. Yet I would argue that each can have a silver lining. The purpose of this article is to point out these silver linings and to suggest how senior executives can take advantage of them.

First, however, an important preliminary point: The four observations appear to be as characteristic of companies that perform well as of those that perform poorly. They are not, in other words, symptoms of some sort of organizational malaise that should be (or could be) “put right.”

At first glance, the four observations offer no obvious encouragement to the senior executive who aspires to shape events and to leave a mark of excellence behind. Considered more thoughtfully, however, they do suggest a hopeful hypothesis: Perhaps the seemingly disorderly bits of the choice process make available to the senior executive a set of opportunities to impart a thrust to, or to fine-tune, his organization’s sense of direction. I believe that this is indeed the case. Let us examine each observation in turn and try to discover its potential silver lining.

Not Enough Choices

Sad Fact No. 1: Senior managers get only one option.

Silver Lining: (a) The option is in accord with senior managers’ preferences; (b) there are enough one-option choices in a given period to permit managers to shape them, over time, as a portfolio.

There is nothing wrong with one option if it is an option the senior manager wants to see. This is an obvious statement, perhaps, but it has not-so-obvious implications. First, it assumes that the senior manager’s main business is unearthing concerns, reminding people about past errors, setting directions, and building management capabilities. Chief executives have little enough time to spend “on the issues”—too little to spend it making complex trade-offs between action alternatives. Their real question, then, is less likely to be “Where are the other options?” than “Does this option contain the thrust we want to see?”

Suppose top managers are worried that their company is making a relatively high-cost product in a major line; it is making Oldsmobiles for a Chevrolet (or Honda) market. The new product slate comes up. Broadly, they want to know: Is it a low-cost slate? More important, is it different from the slates of past years—different in the way they want to see? Top managers’ yes-or-no decision on the proposal is not a check on its optimality. It is, however, a check on its direction and a signal back to, say, division management that “we think you have (or have not) gotten the message.”

Next, consider this one-option agenda over six months or so. There may be a half-dozen decisions of note, which add up to a reasonably sizable portfolio of choices. Viewed in this light, the quarterly or annual slate of choices becomes an array of opportunities to communicate, reinforce, or adjust in a direction top management wishes to pursue.

Not Enough Time

Silver Lining: (a) Each fragment can be used to convey preferences so that the calendar or agenda as a whole provides an opportunity to set direction; (b) lateness is relative; each slight modification of the current option becomes a strong signal about what the next one should look like.

The point here is that fragmentation can, if properly managed, be a positive advantage. As Richard Neustadt wrote of Franklin Roosevelt:

“He had a strong feel for the cardinal fact of government: that presidents don’t act on policies, programs or personnel in the abstract; they act in the concrete as they meet deadlines set by due dates, act on documents awaiting signatures, vacant posts awaiting appointees, officials seeking interviews, newsmen seeking answers, audiences waiting for a speech, etc.”1

The fragments that compose the executive’s working day can be used as a succession of opportunities to tackle bits of the issue stream. It is precisely the fragmented nature of their activity that permits top managers to fine-tune, test, and retest the general strategic direction they are trying to impart to their companies over the longer term.

Moreover, fragmentation of time, properly exploited, can yield a rich variety of information. Within reason, the more views and visits in the top executive’s schedule and the more numerous the interruptions and unscheduled encounters, the better informed he is likely to be. As Mintzberg observes, “The chief executive tolerates interruption because he does not wish to discourage the flow of current information.”2

The potential danger is equally clear: The fragmentation of his time multiplies opportunities for the executive to send inconsistent signals to the organization. To send effective signals to, say, the 25 to 75 key executives in an organization, the top management team must obviously be clear on the general message it wants to get across.

The second aspect of this fact of life is late exposure to issues. Senior managers must accept their fate as reviewers of completed staff work. Rarely does a rough draft, rife with contention over key assumptions or problem attributes, reach the executive suite.

Again, fragmentation, employed effectively, can provide a partial answer. By their very position, top managers seldom deal with problems in isolation. They deal with a flow. Each brief exposure to an issue becomes an opportunity to express general concerns and to gradually sharpen the responses of the organization to reflect the same concerns. One CEO, in the midst of a strategic crisis, devoted a lot of time to a seemingly insignificant customer complaint because, as he explained afterward, it gave him a chance to demonstrate an approach to broad competitive issues that he was trying to instill throughout the organization.

Too Many Filters

Sad Fact No. 3: Bad news is normally hidden.

Silver Lining: Review and comment on details of good news offer a chance to shape attitudes and preferences so that those down the line will share senior management’s priorities.

Inevitably, most news sent up the line to senior managers will be “good”; and, in any case, the chief executive is too far removed from daily operations to unerringly ask the crucial question that might open up a Pandora’s box. True, he can take advantage of the fragmentation of his time to tap multiple sources of information and catch, by designed chance, a few reviews and analyses while debate is still focused on objectives and assumptions rather than on how to package a chosen option so that the “old man” (or the finance staff) will buy it.

More important, however, is the opportunity that the good news presents. Much can be accomplished through a style of good-news review that zeroes in on almost any sort of significant subpoint for special attention and comment. In dealing with the problem of how overextended and partially ignorant congressmen can quickly inform themselves on complex issues, political scientist Aaron Wildavsky makes a relevant point:

“Another way of handling complexity is to use actions on simpler items as indices of more complicated ones. Instead of dealing with the cost of a huge atomic installation, congressmen may seek to discover how personnel and administrative costs or real estate transactions with which they have some familiarity are handled. The reader has probably heard of this practice under some such title as ‘straining at gnats.’ This practice may at times have greater validity than appears on the surface if it is used as a testing device, and if there is a reasonable connection between the competence shown in handling simple and complex items.”3

Top managers regularly use forays into detail as a shield against surprise, and, over time, they can learn a lot this way. More important, though, such attention conveys a sense of “how we deal with problems” and indicates the sort of understanding of issues that is expected of managers down the line. If, additionally, top managers’ probings clearly reflect concern with a particular issue, the danger that their subordinates will lose sight of that issue will be slight.

Such irregular involvement with detail contrasts markedly with the exclusive use of staff for probing. Obviously, staff probes can be productive in some situations, but in others they may simply drive the bad news further into hiding. While using his staff as merciless probers, ITT’s legendary chief executive Harold Geneen was a firm believer in face-to-face reviews because, as he put it, “You can tell by the tone of voice if a fellow is having a problem he hasn’t reported yet.”

A simple but often overlooked aspect of good-news review is the use of praise. An executive can use detailed good-news review deliberately to reinforce desired patterns of action or response. One CEO, when attending field reviews, always stopped in at a regional sales office or plant. He would dig into the records ahead of time, pick out an exemplary action by some salesman or foreman, and make a point of asking him how he had done this or that so well.

He might then take up the idea in a memo that would be sent all around the company. Again, if in the course of a presentation a junior staff man came up with a particularly clever analysis that fit in well with the CEO’s current main concern—for example, looking at the competitor’s position in a new way—he would interrupt the presentation and raise the possibility of introducing the idea into a large class of proposals or reviews.

Too Much Inertia

Sad Fact No. 4: Major choices take months or years to emerge.

Silver Lining: The process of choosing provides an opportunity to build a strong consensus for consistently implementing actions that will require only minimal correction over time. If enough choices are in the hopper, the lengthy sorting process will be punctuated by fairly frequent decisions that will support (or serve to test) top managers’ chosen directions.

An instructive case in point concerns a large industrial products company, long dominated by engineers, that found itself threatened in frightening new ways. Overseas competitors’ products were nicking sizable chunks from previously uncontested market segments. Cash-rich domestic competitors were investing in small companies making promising substitute products for some key lines. The threat was both diffuse and pervasive.

Gradually, over a three- to five-year period, the top team became convinced that its main task was to instill a marketing orientation. Early steps, all in the nature of trial balloons, included: (1) going outside to hire three senior marketers from companies with outstanding marketing reputations; (2) creating a top-level task force to assess the five-year competitive outlook; and (3) giving one of the new marketers a special new product group with a sizable budget to develop a product slate for one of the threatened market niches.

Approximately 18 months later, some more definite signals came of what was afoot: a major speech to security analysts outlining the company’s new approach to marketing; irregular visits to important customers by the president and top team; the establishment of a monthly president’s review, marked by several special sessions on competitive assessment and the beginning of share reporting in certain businesses; the creation of a large number of new assistant regional sales manager jobs and the hiring of highly paid MBAs to fill them. Finally, at about the three-year mark, the top team took some very conspicuous actions. It promoted two of t he three marketers who had been recruited on the outside, together with two insiders, to the position of senior vice president, with realigned market responsibilities.

At the annual shareholders meeting the top team launched a new theme: “Our emerging role is to be preeminent in marketing.” It brought out a slate of surprisingly good new products, striking back hard at competitors in one or two besieged market segments. Internally, it publicly introduced a new management-information and cost system that had been implemented after three years of gradual, incremental development.

Thus, over a 36-month period, without much fanfare, the top team successfully shifted the institution’s attention to the marketplace. Observers today, while noting that engineers still win a fair share of their battles, agree that the company has undergone a radical transformation.

Developing a top management consensus in favor of such a major shift can be a delicate and time-consuming business. Bringing along one crucial member of a triumvirate (or at least effectively neutralizing his opposition) can take years. During such a process, even a decision about when to send up the next trial balloon may be politically loaded. As Peter Drucker wisely noted, “Priorities are easy; posteriorities—what jobs not to tackle—are tough.” His point is consistent with a wide body of psychological research on building commitment and overcoming resistance to change: Keeping a dissident actor from quick-triggering with a negative response is no easy chore.

The period of muddling about on the way to major change is not purely a matter of political maneuvering. At least as important is the “marinating time” it provides.

The period of muddling about on the way to major change is not purely a matter of political maneuvering. At least as important is the “marinating time” it provides. In one company I know, the top 12 executives met weekly for several hours, over an 18-month period, in order to draft a modified change of charter for the company. They have used the resulting document, which they call their “Magna Carta,” as the jumping-off point for a decade of substantial positive change. It is only two pages long. But it took this management group nearly two years to work through the critical issues involved and to come to terms with the new departures involved, although they had had a fairly good idea from the beginning what the shape of the outcome would be.

Revamping Management’s Role

Each of the four seemingly discouraging facts of executive life can, as we have seen, be recast in positive terms. The results add up to a fresh conception of the top management task, one that fits both the disorderly facts of life and their recurrent silver linings. It rejects the traditional notion of the executive as dedicating large, discrete blocks of time to linear chunks called “planning,” “deciding,” or “implementing” and replaces it with something closer to a notion of the effective executive as a communicator, a persuader, and above all, a consummate opportunist. He is adept at grasping and taking advantage of each item in the random succession of time and issue fragments that crowd his day.

This reconception of the top management task requires hard thinking about what is and what is not achievable from the top. The CEO does not drive forklifts or install phones; management theory has long acknowledged that limitation. Research is beginning to suggest a further off-limits area—top managers cannot solve problems: Their attention is fragmented; issues come to them late; and they are shielded from bad news. What they can do is: (1) generally shape business values, and (2) educate by example.

Shaping Business Values

In his landmark study of top management activity, Philip Selznick concludes that the effective institutional leader “is primarily an expert in the promotion and protection of values.”4 Another recent study of leadership by James McGregor Burns contrasts lesser forms of management behavior with “transforming leadership,” which, in the midst of the disorderly press of events, unleashes organizational energies through the promotion of new, overarching values.5

The same theme is echoed by Roy Ash, who created new institutional forms at Litton Industries and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and is currently in the process of reviving Addressograph-Multigraph. As he sees it, the really important change in a company lies in a process of “psychological transformation.” One of Ash’s recent notes to himself, as quoted in Fortune, clarifies his meaning. It reads, “Develop a much greater attachment of everybody to the bottom line—more agony and ecstasy.”6

As descriptions of the top management task, these terms—institutional leadership, value promotion, transforming leadership—are surprisingly congenial to the disorderly, nonrational realities of most real-life management activity. In an untidy world, where goal setting, option selection, and policy implementation hopelessly fuzz together, the shaping of robust institutional values through a principle of ad hoc opportunism becomes preeminently the mission of the chief executive and his most senior colleagues.

The nature of this value-shaping process is not obvious. Among a group of chief executives (actually mayors) they studied, John Kotter and Paul Lawrence found that the more successful executives typically spent over a year carefully taking the pulse of key stakeholders, seeding ideas, and nursing along a consensus in favor of a few new directions. The less effective executives were those who plunged into major commitments before they had built adequate support.7

My own observations are wholly consistent with those of Kotter and Lawrence. The process of easing a larger organization into a major shift of values seems to require anywhere from three to eight years. A good example is the experience of Walter Spencer of Sherwin-Williams, who spent his first five years as CEO working to introduce a marketing orientation into a previously manufacturing-dominated institution. “When you take a 100-year-old company and change the culture of the organization, and try to do that in Cleveland’s traditional business setting—well, it takes time; you just have to keep hammering at everybody,” Spencer told an interviewer from Forbes. “The change over to marketing is probably irreversible now. It’s not complete, but we’ve brought along a lot of young managers with that philosophy, and once you’ve taken a company this far, you can’t go back.”8

The literature of top management generally ignores the intricacies of effective value management, especially the aspect of timing. Yet almost any chief executive knows how much time he must spend on patiently building support for his initiatives. Only when crisis is imminent can the process be condensed, and even then some form of consensus building is needed.

The art of value management, then, blends strategic foresight with a shrewd sense of timing and the political acumen necessary to build stable, workable coalitions. Fortunately, the practical exercise of these skills—as opposed to the textbook fantasies of rational problem solving—is actually enhanced by the untidiness of typical executive choice processes.

CEO as Exemplar

Top management’s actions, over time, constitute the guiding, directing, and signaling process that shapes values in the near chaos of day-to-day operations. As Eli Ginzberg and Ewing Reilley have noted: “Those a few echelons from the top are always alert to the chief executive. Although they attach much importance to what he says, they will be truly impressed only by what he does.”9 Top management is at the apex of the symbolic signaling system, not the hard product-delivery system. Because senior managers cannot act directly or promptly to resolve issues, their daily efforts must focus on sending effective and appropriate signals. Recounts one chief executive:

“The board’s question at my first meeting was trivial: Could I get them speedier information about the installation of new machines? I used the situation as a simple teaching opportunity. I responded with the data requested but recast it in market-share terms. My intent was to wean them away from thinking that the gross number was still an adequate measure of health. That little incident was my first easy opportunity to expose them to share issues.”

The executive who sees his role in these terms is aware that symbol management is a source of both unparalleled opportunity and, for the unwary, unparalleled risk. Knowing that subordinates will eventually make detailed interpretations of his every activity (“The boss was huddling with the investment bankers, was he?” the subordinate might ask himself. “Maybe he wants to unload my division”), he will be scrupulously careful to avoid distracting signals. “People keep searching for clues,” notes linguist Julius Roth. “The poorer and fewer the clues, the more desperate the search.”10

Several business scholars and political scientists have suggested the image of the “leader as educator.” Such a leader, in Selznick’s words, must be able to “interpret the role of the enterprise, to perceive and develop models of thought and behavior, and to find general, rather than merely partial, perspectives.”11

Beyond that, he needs to be able to articulate his vision in a compelling way. Warren Bennis underscores the point: “If I were to give off-the-cuff advice to anyone trying to institute change, I would say, ‘How clear is the metaphor? How is that understood? How much energy are you devoting to it?’ It’s the imagery that creates the understanding, the compelling moral necessity that the new way is right. It was the beautiful writing of Darwin about his travels on the Beagle, rather than the content of his writing, that made the difference. The evolutionary idea had really been in the air for quite a while.”12

If it is in shaping values that the senior executive can most efficiently use his time, it is symbols that are his primary value-shaping tools. As an educator, he has quite an arsenal of pedagogical tricks of the trade at his disposal: manipulation of settings, varied repetition of signals, a range of sensitive responses to subtle feedback cues. Consider:

Careful use of language, including insistently asked questions and attention to the minutiae of written proposals.

Manipulation of settings, including the creation of forums and rules of debate designed to focus on critical concerns.

Shifts of agenda and time allocation to signal, subtly but pervasively, a change in priorities.

Consistent and frequent feedback and reinforcement, including the careful and selective interpretation of past results to stress a chosen theme.

Selective seeding of ideas among various internal power groups and cultivation of those that win support.

Collectively, these enable the CEO to intervene purposefully and effectively in what one philosopher called “the brute flow of random detail that adds up to everyday experience.”

Concluding Note

Senior managers are used to hearing and reading advice about how they can combat sloppiness and introduce rationality or neatness into decision making. I have argued that “sloppiness” is normal, probably inevitable, and usually sensible. Organizations in the process of making important choices almost always look disorderly. But that apparent disorder can provide the latitude and the time required for the development of consensus; and without consensus, efforts at implementation will be doomed from the start.

The task of the senior executive, then, is not to impose an abstract order on an inherently disorderly process but to become adept at the sorts of intervention by which he can nudge it in the desired direction and control its course.

1. Richard E. Neustadt, “Approaches to Staffing the Presidency,” American Political Science Review, December 1963.

At the time this article was first published, Thomas J. Peters was a principal in the San Francisco office of McKinsey & Company. He is now the president of the Tom Peters Company, a global training and consulting company.

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